Alas! no.

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brighten the darkest lot. It is not from such a people rebellion and outrage are to be feared : let the hand of love and gentleness be extended towards them, and there will be a sure return of trust and gratitude: it is only a continuation of wrong and oppression which can goad them to resistance.

Is it thus untrue that insecurity of life and property exists in Ireland ?

I have already asserted that it does insecurity is the rule, security the exception : not confined to this or that district, but overspreading the whole country. But it is not the insecurity of the capitalist or the landholder, but of the peasant, of the broken-down tiller of the soil. It is not the insecurity of a few proprietors, but of millions of the people, the great mass of those whose toil feeds a rapacious oligarchy. The farmer knows not from one season to another whether he will be allowed to till that ground which yields to him a miserable and precarious support; nay, he knows not when he has ploughed the land, and put in the seed, and watched over it with patient longing, whether he shall dare to reap where he has sown : ay, he may reap too ; he may plough, and sow, and reap, and winnow, but he dare not eat the fruit. The old law said :

Ye shall not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. But the new law saith to the human labourer: “ Thou shalt not eat of the results of thy industry.” The curse on man at first was: “By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread;" but the Irish peasant is doubly cursed, for, though the sweat drop from his brow like rain, bread he dare pot eat; his corn and his cattle feed the blacksmith of Birmingham, and the weaver of Manchester,---(blessings on them both, they are fast growing into men!)—but the down-trodden peasant of Erin may roam over her green fields, and mark the young corn shoot up, and gather into ear and ripen, but it blooms not for him : by him stands the agent of his foreign landlord, to snatch from him the fruits which his toil has wrested from the worn out and overdone soil; and if the result is not satisfactory, he turns him out to starve by the wayside, to make room for the more profitablemore profitable, because more justly treated. Nay, he sends him not out alone ; his neighbour, who would have shared with him his last potato, is cast out too ; and as extermination is the object as the beggars would be troublesome about the estate—whoever gives shelter to the desolate wanderers, even in a shealing on a barren

moor, is visited with the terrors of the law, that most fearful engine of oppression to the friendless peasant !

Security of life and property!—it is a mockery in Ireland ; amongst the millions of her children, there is no such thing. Do we require proof?--Every day's report brings with it the harrowing details ; now it is the occupants of a single cabin, now those of a village, who are robbed of their all, and turned out to starve. Proof,—you see it in the squalid rags of thousands who flock to reap your own fields in the harvest time-you see it in the thousands who throng the quays of your maritime ports, to seek that security in foreign lands, which is not granted to them on the soil which their fathers reclaimed from the mountain side and the barren moor, and of which, in many cases, they were also the lords.

Let us dwell a little longer on this proof of insecurity-I mean emigration. There is no man on earth so wedded to his home as the Irishman. The Englishman or the Scotchman leaves his native place with comparative indifference : with us it is a life-struggle ; the instinct of love and country is stronger than in most men, the domestic affections are more intense and sacred, and the social feelings of friendship and relationship are more powerful and binding; hence, the departure of a body of emigrants is one of the most harrowing scenes the eye can light upon, even in this land of suffering ; the wailing and lamentations of some, the calm, subdued grief of others, the wild over-acted merriment of others, put on to conceal their anguish, and cheer the spirit of some one left behind,--but through which you see the starting tears. How often have I seen strong men weeping scalling tears upon the shoulders of their friends, aged men and women struck down under the bereavement of losing the last remnants of their families! I shall never forget one aged woman: she sat upon a beam, her straining eyes riveted upon the receding emigrant ship, and as it left her sight she raised one long dismal scream of anguish, the dreadful music of a breaking heart. Her tale was sad but short. Her “two fine boys” had gone to America three years before, and her niece and daughter, the last remnants of her family, were departing, and she was left alone, with no refuge but the work. house, or the charity of her neighbours. These emigrants no country need be ashamed of; they are healthy, robust, intelligent, and industrious, careful even to parsimony, and what is of more value, they are chaste, temperate, and virtuous. Would such men

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go away if there was security for life and property at home? They are chiefly from the counties of Tipperary, Clare, Galway, and Limerick ; they leave the finest land in Ireland, some of the finest in the world, to till the deserts ; a climate where they can work the whole year, for one where they can work but six months.

There is abundance of reclaimable land in Ireland in the same condition—so far as human industry is concerned as it was left by the deluge. They carry with them, and spend in the expenses of transit, abundant capital for its redemption from waste, and they have willing hands and stalwart arms, but it neither can nor will be sold, and they dare not fix a spade in it: 3850 such emigrants left the port of Limerick this spring, as many more must have taken their departure from other ports ; ,the whole number cannot fall short of 10,000 in the year, from Tipperary and the surrounding counties alone. What a drain is this upon the industrious and virtuous inhabitants of a district containing a population of little more than 1,000,000! Suicidal landlords of Tipperary--of Ireland, ye are driving into banishment the men who would relieve you from debt and pauperism, and make the titles ye possess, not empty sounds as at present, the mockery of those amongst whom

flaunt them; men who would save you from the clutches of the bailiff and the money-lender. Ye are draining your lands, not of its superabundant moisture, but of its industrious and thrifty population, and retaining the idle, the imbecile, and the extravagant. I will not say,

rich men, weep

and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you,"-for they have already overtaken ye. “ Your gold and your

silver are cankered, and your garments, (the flimsy trappings of your former greatness) are worn and moth-eaten." Ye are a scoff and a byword, the beggarly hangers on of aristocracy, watching for the shreds and droppings of pensions and sinecures, or grabbling amongst black-legs and horse jockeys, for the spoils of the silly sons of the English nobility.

Another striking proof of the insecurity of property amongst the poor in Ireland, may be drawn from the nature of the deposits in the savings banks. At present those banks hold about two and a half millions of unemployed capital-judging from the Cork banks, of which alone I know anything-and where 400,0001. are deposited. Much the largest portion of this belongs to small farmers. The average deposits are under 301.; the interest less than 3

per

cent. Now it must be obvious to all, that a farmer

ye

Go to, ye

whose land wants everything that is necessary to make it fruitful, would not put his little savings into a bank where he gets less than 3 per cent. for it, when he miglit put it into liis land, and make 10 or 20 per cent., if he were sure of its remaining his own. There is no bank to the farmer like the soil ; every extra slulling and every extra effort it repays with redoubled interest. Some of the scenes at one bank, though indications of the unsound condition of society, are highly ludicrous ; frequently the manager, or one of the clerks, is called out to some one on particular business ; a gaunt peasant is in waiting, who, after carefully poering through the doors to see that no one is listening, pulls off his but, and whispers softly, that he has a pound or two to have kept for him, but adds with energy, “ God bless your honour, and don't tell anybody.” He then produces the money from some recess in his drapery ; but should any one appear it is instantly conveyed back to its place of concealment. But the money in the savings banks forms but a small portion of the savings of the Irish peasantry; the greater number will not trust them even there, and prefer hiding their accumulations in some cranny in their hovels, the squalid condition of which is, in many cases, preserved to avert suspicion. Yet how have these miserable savings been gained ? One would think, from the caution and fears of the possessors, they were the produce of fraud or violence; far from it; they are the gleanings of the most rigid parsimony, from the results of hard, earnest, and most ill-paid toil.

The previous reasoning replies also to two other items in Mr. Nichols' magic circle-want of capital, and want of employment. Were there security to the farmer, there is over 1,000,0001. in our savings banks, and to this we might add at least as much more, which would assuredly be at once expended on our waste and half-tilled lands, giving employment to all our surplus population ; an employment they are ready to undertake at once, requiring neither training nor acts of parliament. To the other charge, of “want of industry,” the dockyards and larvest-fields, the workshops and railways of England, and the prairies and backwoods of America give the most emphatic denial ; although there is no doubt that the benumbing influence of hopeless poverty, and the contentment produced by despair of advancement, have had their influence on the national character ;-and it would take, perhaps, a generation or two even of more wise and just government than we have ever yet been blessed with in Ireland,

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to produce that self-dependence and untiring perseverance for which the English people are remarkable.

There is but one true remedy for the evils of Ireland, and it is comprised in one word—JUSTICE ; justice to her toiling, ill-clad, ill-housed, ill-fed children. She might, with a fair claim to being heard, ask of England mercy, and a helping hand as well. From her she has received the deep wounds that yet rankle in her sides; but let her receive justice, free unstinted justice, and rapidly will the evils of her condition disappear, and plenty and prosperity visit her. This is vague: I will explain what I mean. It is security for life and property—the cant phrase of some of her doctors, but not as they mean it :-security, not for the lordling in his castle, he does not require it, but for the peasant in his cottage; not for the landowner, but from him ;-security to the poor man for the just results of his industry. There are robbers and murderers in Ireland who disturb its whole moral and physical constitution, and prevent its progress; but they are not clad in rags or frieze, but in brocades and broad cloth, reclining in saloons, living in clubs and palaces, and received and acknowledged in the houses of the great —not the puny midnight assassin doing his solitary murder, but wholesale slaughterers, who sweep away whole families by tens and hundreds at a time—not the caitiff wretch, driven by penury to snatch from the traveller his gold, and trembling for the consequences, but men of title, noblemen, as they are called, wresting from the trembling hand of penury the bread of life, from the toiling hand of industry its hard-earned profits, and doing the whole with legal sanction, according to act of parliament.

To do that justice, to effect that security, the whole system of landed tenure should be altered-it is at present most artificial and absurd. Improvements are proposed, and they show a disposition to grapple with the monster evil of Ireland, but they are but tinkerings. It is not enough that a simple form of lease should be appointed ; landholders should be obliged to give them, by decreeing that in all disputes about land, where there is not documentary evidence to the contrary, and in all doubtful cases, the occupier should be deemed to be the owner. This is the case with regard to all other property; why is land an exception ? Thus would the granting of leases be enforced. These should be as simple as possible, and always at the expense of the landlord, as they would be for his protection, and not that of the tenant. The second improvement proposed is no doubt of value; yet is